Why religion at New School? A dozen responses

We opened "Theorizing Religion" to the public today as part of the Festival of New... four of the people who signed up even came! But it gave me an excuse to invite Matthew Kaufman to speak, and to put together a series of archival images chronicling religious studies at the New School - or perhaps New School history through religious studies.

1920: The first course on religion - taught by Horace Kallen! 

1929: Another Kallen course puts religion on notice

1932: A course asks all the right questions (but on Friday nights!)

1934: The University in Exile brings sociology of religion

1945: New School is where Reinhold Niebuhr analyzes the postwar

 

1951: Tillich, Arendt and others address the modern crisis of meaning

 1961: The spirit of decolonization reframes comparative religion

1970: The New School embraces the Age of Aquarius

1983: We explore feminist reimaginings of religion

1995: Our tradition of interrogating secularism is alive and well

 

2007: Students enact the dialogue of religion and theater

2012: We bring together scholarship, theology and lived religion

Hebraism on 12th Street

Latest installment of our newer truer history of the New School!
It's a fascinating account of Horace Kallen's importance for the New School by Matthew Kaufman, the author of a new biography with whom I've been having such fun comparing notes and sharing discoveries.

Rabbit holes

The work of the prodigious and prolific Horace Kallen, his biographer confirms, is a rabbit hole. "Everything Kallen wrote and said over the course of over 70 years is interconnected," he tells me, "So once you get going, you can’t stop." Yet stop I must!

All I have to do is write an introduction for a talk he gave. The pull of the rabbit hole is great, though, not least because the talk in question isn't very interesting on its own. It's being published because Kallen left few things unpublished, and he was a central figure in the school, and had some interesting ideas. So I feel I have to go beyond the talk (without quite saying it was deservedly unpublished) to introduce Kallen and his work. You had to be there, I'll say: if Kallen's argument was unoriginal, the fact that he was the one making it and the way he made it gave it significance beyond its words. Everyone there will already have known Kallen's distinctive commitments and supplied these as backdrop and horizon of his remarks. The setting was a symposium honoring New School's great director Alvin Johnson, so it's also about the distinctive commitments of the School, which Kallen helped define.

The talk was called "Are there limitations to toleration in a free society?" and Kallen's answer was basically: No. Those dedicated to intolerance are not philosophically inconsistent when they take advantage of the tolerance of the tolerant - even if it is to destroy the "Society of Toleration." (A favorite example from the 19th century Louis Veuillot: Upon your principles you are bound to tolerate us; upon ours we are right to persecute you. [5]) Inconsistent, however, are those who claim that the Society of Toleration must defend itself by refusing to tolerate intolerance. It's a conundrum constitutive of a free society [2]. Kallen calls it the "Predicament of Toleration," and offers no philosophical way out of it.

Delivered presciently a month before Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists in the State Department, Kallen's aim seems mainly to have been vindicating an American tradition of toleration of dissent threatened by political opportunists exaggerating the threat of communist infiltration. He quotes Jefferson's first Inaugural:  

"If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this union, or change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." [4] 

Even if the threat were significant, however, it would be not only inconsistent but self-defeating to seek to protect tolerance through intolerance. [I]f the tolerant tolerated the intolerant, the latter wold put an end to toleration; if the tolerant suppressed the intolerant, they would themselves put an end to toleration. In either case, toleration would be kaput. [5] Is the Society of Toleration doomed?

Kallen presents the long view. The predicament of toleration is nothing new. Indeed, for most of human history - and all of human history in most parts of the world - the idea of tolerance was an outlier, often persecuted. Kallen discusses Catholics medieval and antimodern, Hitler and Lenin, but reminds us that the idea that error has not the same right as truth [6] has a venerable history. But America is safe, the strongest, the best-informed, the richest, the freest and the most stable of the nations of the world [7], strengthened by the Supreme Court 8], innumerable voluntary associations - and by university presidents rebuffing the intolerance of intemperate alumni. Where an institution - be it a university, a corporation, a church, a state or a learned society - penalizes variance, it converts opinion into dogma, the search for truth into the iteration of creed, and honesty into hypocrisy [9]. The advocates of a Society of Toleration share Jefferson's conviction that "It is error which needs the support of government; truth can stand by itself" [6] but know that the victory of truth is never assured.

That the law, so conceived and so administered, protects threats to the very existence of toleration, that it extends a suicidal invitation to its enemy to use it as the means of its extinction, those to whom freedom is the fighting faith well know. They accept the risk. [10]

Kallen winds up by saying he knows of no way to save the Society of Toleration from its predicament and still keep it a society of toleration [11]. He hasn't presented any new ideas, nor does he claim to have. The phrase "predicament of toleration" may be new, but every advocate of free societies has known it. What makes this a specifically Kallenian presentation lies in the way he makes the argument.

Central to Kallen's argument is religious language. The phrase "fighting faith" is only one of many such uses, perhaps the most explicit of which came a few pages earlier: it might be said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted on December 10, 1948, offers us this faith in the equal liberty of the unlike to be the common religion of mankind. [4-5] And, indeed, his final words offer a religious proof-text:

In action, a free society always hazards its future on a faith which does not guarantee the outcome in advance. Faiths, William James tells us in the Varieties of Religious Experience, are hypotheses and may not make "rationalistic and authoritarian pretensions." There is "no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or too much." This is the predicament of belief. It is particularly the predicament of belief in toleration. [11]

The reference to James, seen to have anointed Kallen his successor, fundamentally reframes the "predicament." What might otherwise be a paralyzing paradox or an existentialist challenge is instead shown to be a puzzle that can (and can only) be gotten past through action. Every belief is a bet. Kallen could have referenced James' Pragmatism at the end of this lecture, or even The Will to Believe (from whose Preface the lines he quotes actually hail) but it's significant that he rather cites Varieties of Religious Experience. Kallen taught and wrote about religion from his first year at the New School (his Why Religion? purported to be an extension of Varieties). While religious traditions are models of intolerant authoritarianism, religion properly understood offers hope to the society of freedom which was his true object. The struggle to keep on struggling requires experience and even institutions best characterized in religious terms. The work of a free society is not just political or philosophical but spiritual.

When Horace Kallen gave that speech exhorting people not to give up on what he sometimes called "the American idea," it thus differed in important ways from the sources he cites - Jefferson, Madison, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. We sense that difference in the long view narrative, in which the forces of intolerance vastly preponderate. It takes something like religious faith for the Society of Toleration to continue to offer the "suicidal invitation" to the intolerant, even as the enemy circles around you.

What Kallen thinks makes it possible to resist the temptations of intolerance is the experience - of individuals and of society as a whole - of a social atmosphere, a climate of opinion, a consensus, in which toleration has become dominant, which he somewhat confusingly describes as creations of a firm belief, embodied in works, among people who are different from each other and have learned to live together with each other in equal liberty, also for the intolerant [11]. Kallen dedicated his life to understanding freedom (he was that very semester teaching "Problems in the Philosophy of Freedom"), but the experience of it seems to arise especially in a society committed to what had by that time already become his greatest legacy, "cultural pluralism." The safety of freedom, he said, consists in the number and diversity of the free [2].

I'm not sure where to go from here....

1. The "diversity of the free" could offer an in to Kallen's theory of "cultural pluralism," but I don't really want to wade into that - even though it's the only thing he's now remembered for. (It's in the talk in abbreviated form, where he says of the society of toleration Its wholeness will be that of free inner orchestration [2].)

2. I'd rather segue from "social atmosphere" to the "atmosphere of freedom" which the New School claims for itself in its catalogs from that time. (This is from the 1950-51 one.) I don't think many of the other folks at that symposium used Kallen's religious argot, but all were happy to inhabit the pluralist intellectual culture Alvin Johnson had just a few years before credited to Kallen: "With the development of the institution, Kallen's position, which had at first seemed far off center, came to express more nearly than any other the real meaning and objectives of the New School.” Johnson discussed Kallen’s now forgotten role in constituting the faculty of the University in Exile, which had offered refuge to all the other speakers at the 1950 symposium:

They were selected with a view to their development of creativeness, in the frame of the New School adult education organization. With their selection Kallen had much to do; but Kallenism had more to do with it. Kallenism is the principle that we live in a multiple world, multiple in national and racial characteristics, in art and letters, in religion and philosophy. It is the essential doctrine of Kallenism that out of multiplicity alone, multiplicity accepted with eager interest, can the creative process grow, in matters intellectual and in life itself.

Foreward to Freedom and Experience: Essays presented to Horace M. Kallen, ed. Sidney Hook & Milton R. Konvitz (Ithaca & NY: Cornell UP for The New School for Social Research, 1947), xii, xvi

"Kallenism" was connected to the now nearly unintelligible adult education mission of the New School, for which, too, Kallen was a major advocate. (In the picture below, Kallen gives a prize in adult education, in 1951.) The professionalization of the universities was something Kallen's teacher James had already railed against. Kallen and his school were part of a public education movement, significantly shaped by pragmatism, whose very self-understanding sounds in the today's academy like a put-down: popularizers of philosophy. The New School's great contribution on the eve of the establishment of the University in Exile, the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, was a work of popularization. (Kallen wrote a fascinating series of articles for it, incidentally, bridging psychology, philosophy and religion: Behaviorism; Blasphemy; Coercion; Conditioned Reflex; Conformity; Consensus; Cults; Functionalism; Innovation; Intransigence; James, William; Modernism; Morals; Persecution; Pragmatism; Psychoanalysis; Radicalism; Reformism; Self-Preservation.)

 

But the rabbit holes I'm really tempted go down have to do with religion. At least three are beckoning to me.

3. One looks to that weird poem he published just at the moment, which imagines human history as a beach pounded by relentless waves of gods, conjured by human fear, with America a kind of respite. That could take one into the ideas of a kind of civil religion of religious pluralism or "religion of religions" (the biographer thinks Kallen scooped Robert Bellah's influential 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America") which will appear in Kallen's quixotic Secularism is the Will of God in 1955.

4. Another looks more at the Jamesian legacy Kallen claims, perhaps using this powerful early formulation:

The world is all conflict; it contains evil, it is full of menace and danger. But these are not eternal. Man is genuinely free, he can change his world and himself for the better. He can ameliorate by his very faith. In a universe rich with actual contingencies, faith and works even of so small an item as man, may be and often are, pregnant with tremendous human and even cosmic consequences. You are, therefore, entitled to believe at your own risk, and since the world is in flux, the mere existence of that belief may be just the one needed factor to make its object real. Nothing is eternally damned, nothing eternally saved; the contributing value to the validity of your beliefs, to the strength of your life, is as much yourself as the environment to which you must adapt yourself. 

This is giddy-making but the really fun thing about using it would be that it appears in Kallen's early essay "Hebraism and Current Trends in Philosophy" (1909). For Kallen, Willam James, as an American and a Darwinian, helps restore an ancient way of thinking with roots in the biblical tradition - especially in Job, who, in fact, turns up in the next sentence:

But this is only the modern way of asserting in an unfortuitous environment "I know that He will slay me, nevertheless will I maintain my ways before Him."

Judaism at Bay: Essays toward the Adjustmnt of Judaism to Modernity (NY: Bloch, 1932), 12

That line of Job (13:15) is Kallen's most cherished mantra. It shows up everywhere - for instance in the conclusion of his thousand-page Art and Freedom (1940), the expanded version of the "Beauty and Use" essay we've often used in class. It's arguably the spirit behind the argument for tolerating the intolerant who are committed to slaying you. (In The Liberal Spirit, published in 1948, Job 13:15 is presented as the "ultimate statement of... humanism," and rendered "Behold, he will slay me; I shall not survive; nevertheless will I maintain my ways before him" (187).) The ideal of the Society of Toleration is really "Hebraism."

5. A final rabbit hole has to do with the Hebraism of the New School itself. All of the speakers at the 1950 symposium - excepting the past and current Presidents Johnson and Simons - were Jewish, though this probably wasn't something they would have drawn attention to. Kallen may have been the explicit link between the New School and Jewish experience, safe perhaps because he was an American (though also an immigrant) and the scion of James, Royce and Santayana. Kallenist pluralism, with its resolute refusal of convergence, its celebration of the "equal liberty of the unlike" and the "diversity of the free" constitutive of a society of freedom seems to me profoundly shaped by the struggle for Jewish identity in the face of Christian, Americanist and other supersessionisms.

One of the most interesting things I found in the Archives (they've since digitized it!) was a "Memorandum on the New School" written by Kallen at about this time (early 1950s), which asserts that New School had for a long time been pioneering a way of integrating Jewish tradition into education. It's fascinating, and spells out in an uprecedented way things we have long surmised about the Jewish demography and ethos of the place. But it doesn't suggest there is something Hebraist about the very pluralism of the place. Kallen's preferred language, at this stage at least (though Hebraism continued to be a central motif of his course "Dominant Ideals in Western Civilization"), is the language of freedom - and of religion! In another contemporary archival find, a letter Kallen sent to president Simons in 1951 (not a Jew though married to one), we learn that Kallen regarded New School itself as a sort of religion!

Men and women who understand the meaning of freedom, and of its relation to truth, and whose belief in them has the quality of religious commitment, are necessarily in the minority. The [New] School’s successful functioning must needs depend therefore on the support of such a consecrated minority, whose relations to it must be like membership in a church. Indeed, in many ways, the New School does constitute a free religious society, whose faith is the freedom of the human spirit, and whose rites and works are the School’s characteristic study of freedom’s nature, forms, circumstance, growth, and configurations in free society.

Whew!

Too many rabbit holes, and each seeming to whisper "someone should write an essay about this!"

What to do?

(pics are from here)

Land of the religion-free

Well, Horace Kallen's quite the character. Given the chance to write something about him. I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed. The man was beyond prolific - forty books and countless articles, in all kinds of different venues and fora. I've found my Virgil, though, a scholar who's just completed a biography of Kallen (coming out end of this month!), with whom I've been exchanging passionate e-mails. He's helped me understand many things, not least how Hebraism - a term Kallen wrested from Matthew Arnold's pejorative usage - comes to define modernity and all its values: science, justice, democracy, internationalism. The "Hellenism" Arnold praised has been refuted by Darwin, who has shown concern with unchanging essences to be not just untrue to the world we live in but a refusal to accept and engage it.

We've persuaded the biographer to write a piece for the New School histories vertical, and it's been fun to watch it take shape. While New School was a center for Kallenism, most Kallen scholarship focuses on work he wrote before he came here, and on his participation in secular Jewish movements which crossed paths only implicitly with the New School. For each story, it turns out, Kallen left a not inconsiderable archive of works. For the moment I'm trying to find a way to characterize his engagement on multiple fronts simultaneously, to audiences which might have been distinct - but might also have overlapped. Was the Jewishness of Kallen's understanding of American democracy (Hebrew prophets by way of the Puritans, but especially by way of the proto-secularist Job) an open secret, an accepted open secret? Was Kallen operating in discrete worlds or linking them?

Today's discovery: at the very time Kallen was giving the talk on toleration at the New School which it's my task to contextualize, he had just published a poem in a journal called The Humanist. Another tussle with Arnold, this does "Dover Beach" one better (well, not perhaps poetically better), evoking the desolation someone might feel on a shore ever assailed by waves of gods called forth by human fear! A taste:

There's a denouement, which rather scrambles the metaphor. After a lampoon of assorted religious rituals (Catholic litany and Buddhist/Hindu Om) appears a lighthouse promising safe harbor - at Sankety, which a note explains is the easternmost point in the United States. America, refuge from the dull booming roar of old world religion!

Land ho! Strange prophet.

Horace M. Kallen, "Dr. Freud Says It's Compensation,"

The Humanist vol 10 (1 Jan 1950): 54-57, 55

Hyphen-nation!

Had a blast today looking through some of the things left when Horace Kallen gave his papers to other archives. Nobody's quite sure where these were found, but they include random correspond-ence, articles he read (meticulously underlined), reviews and prefaces he wrote, notes for some of his lecture courses ... and some very old things, like the notes above from his undergraduate years at Harvard! I was excited to find drafts from the earliest version of his The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, as well as a 1959 new edition - and the script from a version of his "Euripidean" arrangement of Job performed at a Synagogue House in 1926.

But what I was there for was the context of a talk he gave in 1950, "Are there limits to toleration in a free society?" at a symposium dedicated to Alvin Johnson entitled "One Globe - Two Worlds." The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal is publishing the talk as part of its centennial commemoration and I've promised to write an introduction for it. The talk in itself is not
that interesting - the tolerant must tolerate the intolerance of the intolerant - but will have meant more interesting things coming from someone who had dedicated a career to understanding the "American idea" in terms of cultural pluralism. Here's something which, judging from its placement in the files, might have been the introduction of Kallen at that symposium.

Liberal education, Kallen points out, cannot be truly liberal unless it is intercultural. It must assume the parity of every people's culture in dignity and worth and seek untrammeled communication between them on equal terms. ... Education, says Dr. Kallen, is hyphenation and hyphenation is civilisation. All totalitarianisms, whether political, religious, economic, or cultural, are anti-hyphen and therefore anti-education.

Hearing voices

Have I told you that, as part of a new curriculum of "one text" courses, I'll be spending half of next semester reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience - just the Varieties - with a small group of students? The model comes (unsurprisingly) from the Philosophy Department, but I'm looking forward to giving some undivided attention to Varieties, which, truth be told, I haven't given a thorough reread since graduate school.

Varieties was on the bill in "Theorizing Religion" today - first of two days, where we're reading two clumps of lectures. As I've been doing for rather longer than I realized (时间都去哪儿了?), today's class was centered on reading aloud some of the many testimonies James includes. He read them aloud when delivering the lectures (although all of them were written texts before he vocalized them...), and hearing these strange words, in his voice, must have been a significant part of the experience of the Varieties. So students chose a half dozen of the long quotations and read them aloud. I had them consider the generosity of James' lending his voice this way  - surely, his reading wasn't mocking or distancing but a demonstration of a will to hear if not to understand others' experiences, he was a sort of spirit medium for others.

Later in the class I performed one of his acts of possession, quite emotionally rendering the famous account of the person overwhelmed by a sense that the gauziest film kept him from the catatonic paralysis of an "Epileptic patient" he'd seen in an asylum, unable to function or even move. It's shattering, heart-breaking. (No small number of students at our school know comparable experiences of anxiety and depression.) We lingered in it for a while, then I let them know that this was in fact James' own experience, though he never says so. Varieties isn't a view from the mountaintop of religious consolation and empowerment, but from farther down, by someone who's never been to the summit and is, indeed, "constitutionally incapable" of getting there. (He doesn't claim legitimacy from a personal experience of the depths, either.) What a feat of generosity the Varieties now seems, acknowledging the value of experiences he himself had not had! The class was awed...

And I was not a little pleased to have done for James, lending my voice to him, what he did for so many others. What a pleasure it will be to give Varieties of Religious Experience even more time!

(And yes, that edition was blurbed by James' student Horace Kallen.)

Falling into revisionism

In our course on the history of The New School today we introduced the Parsons problem. How do we tell the story of Parsons before it merged with The New School? (If we identified as Parsons people it might rather be The New School problem.) Since all the university's efforts today are going into making us a distinctive and delightful fusion of the two, how does one avoid making it seem like TNS and Parsons were destined to come together, despite the 51 + 74 years they'd spent happily on their own?

My co-teacher J started the lecture with some important critiques of the "new history" we learned about last week. While it's good not to be terrorized by the past, mining the past only for answers to present questions risks missing much that happened. Many historians think we stand to learn the most  - both about the past and for understanding our prospects - from trying to understand the past's own questions. Distance allows perspective. For my part, I likened our slick common timeline to the way, when old folks get married, perhaps after divorce or widowhood, people often present a series of parallel old photos suggesting the present convergence was in the cards from the start. Look, both of them with lollipops as toddlers! hugging big dogs! awkward in formal dress as teenagers! raising a glass as young adults! with embarrassingly dated hairdos or eyeglasses! in the mountains or in Venice! Clearly they were meant to be one!

J then provided a helpfully defamiliarizing history of Parsons - starting with the several names it went through even before the arrival of Frank Alvah Parsons, its later namesake. American impressionism? Fine and applied arts? Period rooms? Decorative arts? Costume design? Standards of taste? None of these resonates with our current design-led argot.

But then I went and messed things up. I have a tendency - a virtue in most classes - to refer back to past classwork a lot, like a juggler who keeps adding balls, never letting any go. It gives students a sense of knowledge as a conversation, and incentives to do the readings and remember them, since they'll keep coming back. But in the setting of today's class I should have emphasized disjunction rather than continuity. I meant to! Instead, I talked about Horace Kallen, in the description to whose Spring 1921 course "Beauty and Use" the word design appears for the first time in a New School course catalog, as if he were already then part of the conversation of Parsons. Laying out the argument of the article which came out of this course 18 years later, I translated Kallen's somewhat forbidding mid-century philosophese into the familiar idiom of today's makers, innovators, design thinkers. Oops!

New School for Social Research Announcement 1920-21, 14

And then things got even worse. Before I knew it, the students' evident satisfaction at these harmonizing translations led me to assert affinities between the rather opaque arguments of Frank Alvah Parsons and Kallen, between Parsons and the historian founders, and - the nadir - between plein air impressionism of Parsons' earliest progenitors and pragmatism's anti-metaphysical ethos. Oy vey!

In my defense, the gap between the cultures of the two places seems to me so great that this was all just a rhetorical game: "if one were trying to bridge these histories, the best one could do would be X [clearly contrived affinity]..." But to the students, who don't know better (indeed, all they know is that The New School is part of the name of Parsons, and that The New School's logo is in Parsons Red), this may have achieved the opposite of what we were seeking to do, which was to keep the histories far enough apart from each other to open space for questions about our present smarmy symbiosis. Oops. Next week we estrange again.

Traditions of The New

I interrupted my Spring Break staycation to head back to school today. Just for a few hours, and for a worthy cause - the third Staff Development Day kicked off with a plenary talk by my friend J and me - the New School history team! Our topic: "What does it mean to be a progressive university"? We took turns describing periods when "progressive" meant different things. J set the stage with the Progressive Movement, and all the new things (history, Republic, Negro, woman) contemporary with our New School. Then I talked about the pluralism - as ideal and practice - of The New School in its first decades, exemplified by pragmatist philosopher Horace Kallen. J then discussed the school's jittery ethos during the Cold War, already a "tradition of the new" in need of safeguarding. My turn again, the Matsunaga Affair which brought back the challenges of being truly diverse. (These last two sections expanded on our Offense & Dissent exhibition.) Finally we turned to the school's newest marketing campaign, which goes What happens when a university rethinks everything? Against the backdrop of our history this seems neither possible nor necessary nor, well, wise. One lesson of the bumpy road we've traversed is that we'll be most effectively attuned to our time and place and role only if we take our own history seriously. Our weighty talk ended on a light note, though, with Gnarls, our recently adopted - and "progressive!" - school mascot. Having a mascot might seem out of keeping with our unconventional history, but a narwhal is a most unconventional mascot. And, contrary to rumor, "narwhals are real, not magical unicorn-dolphin-clowns."

Kallenism

It was "Beauty and Use" day in my first year seminar today. We read Horace Kallen's rather dense 1939 article by that name, distilled from the identically named course Kallen had been teaching at The New School at least since 1924-25 (above). I've taught about it before, but this was the first time in a seminar setting. It serves several functions. Historically it's a bridge from the founding generation's pragmatist sense of the demands of the new (which we encountered in Dewey's Democracy and Education) to the New School's revised identity as a center of social research in the modern arts: our next three classes focus on new forms of movement, image and sound as social research. Disciplinarily it's our taste of philosophical aesthetics (the class is introducing writing in many disciplines and modes), and its invocation of Keats' famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (above) allowed us to spend some time with poetry as well. (One student proved to be an expert reciter of poems, even though she'd not seen it before.) It's also the first of several readings which are the published versions of influential courses taught at The New School. I'm also trying to get students to see and seek out the sorts of influences, contrasts and connections which college-level reflection demands. So we spent much of today talking about "pragmatism" and how similar Dewey on education is to Kallen on art.
Even without a renewed exposure to Dewey (and the Deweyan legacies I'm encountering at Teachers College) I'd try to get students to figure things out, link to things they learned before, notice shared arguments and points of reference, but in a room full of people who've just read Dewey I couldn't help frequently pointing out how what we were doing was just what we'd read about... For several students I could see the "Aha!" when I showed them the pamphlet of Kallen's from 1932 at left. "You know what the title refers to," I said, and then they remembered, yes they did: Dewey's argument for "immaturity" as a power of growth which should never be left behind makes reference to humanity's distinctive "prolonged infancy." (In fact, Kallen's argument is a little different, close to Dewey's critique of education disconnected from life, but not couched in quite the same terms; for Dr. Kallen "infancy" is a state artificially maintained by finishing school-like colleges which shelter students from the real-life experience which alone makes learning meaningful and, perhaps, possible. None of our early faculty had much interest in "traditional" college age students...)

And a final connection - more a sort of parallel, framed by the meeting of the parallel lines half a century later. We also read Frank Alvah Parsons' 1911 address "Art in Advertising" which, in a completely different setting, argued against the idea that art can and must be for its own sake. His view that applied art is no less art for its achievement of some other purpose (like convincing someone to buy something) was interestingly like and unlike Kallen's more abstract argument that beauty is a moment in the adventure of use. I personally think Kallen's argument ("Beauty is accomplished use; use is beauty in the making") a little more profound, but for present purposes it's enough to have raised the question if the New School's turn away from traditional conceptions of knowledge and education can lend its later merger with Parsons a retrospective fitness. Pragmatism and "design thinking," who new?

Public Seminar

I get to headline Public Seminar, the new website of the New School for Social Research! Public Seminar is modeled on the University in Exile's General Seminar, started eighty years ago this year. (You've heard me natter on about it.) I played up the NSSR connections, from the Horace Kallen cameo in its very first sentence to the words "social research" at at the very end of the very last (and coming after a little Durkheimian wink). You can read the whole piece - the start, I'm thinking, of a series on contemporary engagements with the Book of Job - here.

Your toes show it

Two poems I haven't really thought about since high school made a return in the last days. The more serious was Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," part of which I read in the course of explaining Horace Kallen's 1939 essay "Beauty and Use" for our New School history course.

I'm not sure my reading was very good (though I did practice many times), but I hope my pluck at least made students sit up and take notice. None would admit to having caught the reference in the Kallen essay or even knowing the poem, so although I joined Kallen in criticizing the poem's desire for a beauty so pure it was immaterial and outside time, one of them might years from now thank me for introducing them to Keats. (The teaching life!)

The other poem is from Don Marquis's series about Archy the cockroach and his alley cat friend Mehitabel (about the same time as the emerging New School, come to think of it). I've tried lazily to recover it several times over the years, finally succeeding last night with some visiting friends. It's quite as splendid as I recalled, though much longer - I remembered mainly the bit starting at line 12 and ending with the beetle saying "amen." I'm not sure where or why I will have encountered this poem as a child; glad to be reconnected to it, though!

the robin and the worm 

a robin said to an
angleworm as he ate him
i am sorry but a bird
has to live somehow the
worm being slow witted could
not gather his
dissent into a wise crack
and retort he was
effectually swallowed
before he could turn
a phrase
by the time he had 
reflected long enough
to say but why must a
bird live
he felt the beginnings 
of a gradual change
invading him
some new and disintegrating 
influence
was stealing along him
from his positive
to his negative pole
and he did not have 
the mental stamina
of a jonah to resist the
insidious
process of assimilation
which comes like a thief
in the night
demons and fishhooks
he exclaimed
i am losing my personal
identity as a worm
my individuality
is melting away from me
odds craw i am becoming
part and parcel of
this bloody robin
so help me i am thinking
like a robin and not
like a worm any
longer yes yes i even
find myself agreeing
that a robin must live
i still do not
understand with my mentality
why a robin must live
and yet i swoon into a 
condition of belief
yes yes by heck that is
my dogma and i shout it a
robin must live
amen said a beetle who had
preceded him into the 
interior that is the way i
feel myself is it not
wonderful when one arrives 
at the place
where he can give up his
ambitions and resignedly
nay even with gladness
recognize that it is a far
far better thing to be 
merged harmoniously
in the cosmic all
and this confortable situation
in his midst
so affected the marauding 
robin that he perched
upon a blooming twig
and sang until the
blossoms shook with ecstacy
he sang
i have a good digestion
and there is a god after all
which i was wicked 
enough to doubt
yesterday when it rained
breakfast breakfast
i am full of breakfast
and they are at breakfast
in heaven
they breakfast in heaven
all s well with the world
so intent was this pious and
murderous robin
on his own sweet song
that he did not notice
mehitabel the cat
sneaking toward him
she pounced just as he
had extended his larynx
in a melodious burst of
thanksgiving and
he went the way of all
flesh fish and good red herring
a ha purred mehitabel
licking the last
feather from her whiskers
was not that a beautiful
song he was singing
just before i took him to
my bosom
they breakfast in heaven
all s well with the world
how true that is
and even yet his song
echoes in the haunted
woodland of my midriff
peace and joy in the world
and over all the 
provident skies
how beautiful is the universe
when something digestible meets
with an eager digestion
how sweet the embrace
when atom rushes to the arms
of waiting atom
and they dance together
skimming with fairy feet
along a tide of gastric juices
oh feline cosmos you were
made for cats
and in the spring
old cosmic thing
i dine and dance with you
i shall creep through
yonder tall grass
to see if peradventure
some silly fledgling thrushes
newly from the nest
be not floundering therein
i have a gusto this
morning i have a hunger
i have a yearning to hear 
from my stomach
further music in accord with
the mystic chanting
of the spheres of the stars that
sang together in the dawn of
creation prophesying food
for me i have a faith
that providence has hidden for me
in yonder tall grass
still more
ornithological delicatessen
oh gayly let me strangle
what is gayly given
well well boss there is
something to be said
for the lyric and imperial
attitude
believe that everything is for
you until you discover 
that you are for it
sing your faith in what you
get to eat right up to the
minute you are eaten
for you are going 
to be eaten
will the orchestra please
strike up that old
tutankhamen jazz while i dance
a few steps i learnt from an
egyptian scarab and some day i
will narrate to you the most
merry light headed wheeze
that the skull of yorick put
across in answer to the 
melancholy of the dane and also
what the ghost of
hamlet s father replied to the skull
not forgetting the worm that
wriggled across one of the picks
the grave diggers had left behind
for the worm listened and winked
at horatio while the skull and the
ghost and prince talked
saying there are more things
twixt the vermiform appendix
and nirvana than are dreamt of
in thy philosophy horatio
fol de riddle fol de rol
must every parrot be a poll
                          archy

O ye of little faith

You'll recall, perhaps, that we will feature at least two ways of "starting the story" about The New School in our course. One is the familiar Columbia story, according to which professors indignant over Columbia University's firing of pacifists during World War 1 headed downtown to start a better university, explicitly dedicated to academic freedom. The other could be called the Croly story, and suggests that the Columbia folks stepped into an already ongoing concern, the idea of "new schools of social science/research" developed not from a university but from a magazine, The New Republic. The New Republic's editor, Herbert Croly, wrote a long article about the need for "A School of Social Research" in June 1918. The school's first buildings were around the corner from the New Republic office on Ninth Ave, and many board members as well as its first president came from the New Republic too. It's quite a different story if we're born from the head of a university or a magazine!

More on that anon. But rereading the Croly essay (we've assigned it, along with the original "Proposal" and works on education by Columbia's president Nicholas Murray Butler and John Dewey), I find grist for another of my mills. The essay argues for a school like the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques (now "Sciences Po") in Paris, bringing science's experimental method and practical learning to educate people who will provide the expertise and administrative acumen required for complex modern societies to thrive. Without such people - and Croly clearly has no faith in universities' ability to produce such people - civilization's in grave danger. Technical advances exacerbate class conflicts, and for this and other reasons everyone's giving up on human nature. The new school will be founded in the faith that science can give back to mankind some of the security and integrity which its own capture by individual, national and class particularism has jeopardized.

Yay science! But Croly's final paragraph ends all religious:

A "restoration" of religion? Are we to conclude that religion was part of the New School story not just with the secularization theorists in the 1960s and their critics in the 1980s, with Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950s, with Jacques Maritain in the 1940s, with the "Religion - Why?" series of 1932, or with Horace Kallen's course "The Function of Religion in Social Progress already in our second year, but from the very moment of conception? Yes and no. Croly was, by some accounts, the first baby in America baptized into Auguste Comte's "religion of humanity"! The "new faith" whose birth we were to "anticipate by education" was humanist - but no less religious for that.

Can't you see it? The New School: A Religion.

Superstition or common sense?

Another religious studies discovery from the New School Scrapbooks, this from 1933 (#9/3, page 3). What can we make of this quite amazing list of speakers? Who planned it, who came to hear? One thing at least is clear: a lecture series on Friday nights excludes observant Jews.

Update 27/4: It appears to have been not in 1933 but in Spring 1932:
"Factual rather than propagandistic"! Our first guess is that it was the brainchild of Arthur L. Swift, a theologian and sociologist at Union Theological Seminary, who herewith started a long-standing relationship with The New School which would include teaching (I should check what courses he taught), heading an important self-study in 1953, becoming Vice President some years later, and receiving an Honarary Degree at the end of his career in 1961. The only surprise is that Horace Kallen, who had been teaching about religion since 1920 and whose course "Dominant Ideals of Western Civilization" appears as course #6 in this same Spring 1932 catalog, had no part in it.

Multiversity

I think we did the three-ring circus of The New School proud today. With the help of one of our teaching assistants, we brilliantly conveyed the school at its early 40s apogee. The show began with these two images -

the familiar modernist auditorium repurposed as a theater by Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and the familiar Benton room playing host to a seminar (doubtless in French) by the École Libre des Hautes Études' Henri Bonnet. The point was not that earlier things had been displaced but precisely the opposite. The Dramatic Workshop and École Libre joined an already vigorous set of overlapping institutions. Alvin Johnson insisted that all the faculty of University in Exile (Graduate Faculty) teach a course in the Adult Education program each year. Piscator required all his theater students to take night courses there, too.

The École and the Dramatic Workshop are lesser known parts of New School history, as they did not last. The École, founded as a French/Belgian university in exile in 1942, severed connections with The New School in 1947 and helped build up the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. (A remnant remained in New York, too, at least through 1967.) And the Dramatic Workshop, established in 1940, was shut down after a decade, ostensibly for economic reasons. Piscator returned to Europe when called to testify before HUAC.

The many splendored New School of the early 1940s can be a bit hard to get a handle on. Had the place lost focus? Indeed, there were more entities than just the Adult Division, Graduate Faculty, École and Dramatic Workshop. The Graduate Faculty had spawned an autonomous Institute of World Affairs. And the Adult Division had created a Senior College in anticipation of the BAs it would offer starting in 1944 to returning GIs, itself divided into a School of Politics (dean Hans Simons) and a School of Philosophy and Liberal Arts (dean Clara Mayer - yes!). People at the time must have wondered if The New School had exploded, too, as Alvin Johnson in a December 1943 Bulletin wrote:

 

I had a theory about what Johnson meant by "true American" here - more than obligatory profession of patriotic commitment required for a group of emigrés during wartime (though there was that, too). The key was Horace Kallen's ideas of pluralism, as Johnson explained in 1946:
The New School was flourishing and, far from being diluted or disturbed by new divisions, it was living out its key idea - the "acceptancc with eager interest" of "multiplicity" of approaches and genres. If this hadn't been the central idea of the founders, so much the worse for them. Over the course of its first quarter-century, The New School had demonstrated that an institution might be stronger for being truly pluralistic in structure. How else would the "creative process" learn to outgrow received views?

Our teaching assistant R provided a lovely illustration of the fruits of such pluralism from within the École Libre. It involves these gentlemen,

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structural linguist Roman Jakobson - both rather younger during their École Libre years. Lévi-Strauss (who died in 2009; imagine if, like Marc Bloch, he had not escaped the Nazis but died in 1944?) did not know Jakobson but attended his lectures at the École and realized he was an unwitting structuralist. Jakobson returned the favor, attending Lévi-Strauss' lectures on kinship, confirming the affinity - then recommended Lévi-Strauss write a book about it. Elementary Forms of Kinship was written in his studio on 11th Street off Sixth Avenue, and the discipline of anthropology was changed. Would this have happened without the École Libre and the interdisciplinary example of its Kallenist host The New School?


The cavalcade continued with my colleague J's account of the arts, social research and politics at The New School before and during the years Piscator spent here. The Group Theater (above) taught in the mid-1930s. The  communist-inspired First American Artists Congress Against War and Fascism also took place there. Arts as social research has been one of our central themes in the class thus far, but J took it up a notch by contrasting it with political art ("art as politics") like Piscator's agitprop of the 1920s, and with the applied art of the school led by Frank Parsons (which joined The New School family in 1970).

Political art used the arts to convey political messages. Applied arts took classical and European forms and adapted them to the demands of modern American life. But New School artists we've seen, from Cowell to Humphrey to Benton to Abbott, start with modern urban life and its problems, developing art forms to express its energy and its challenges.

Should I perhaps not describe this period, when artists and scholars of many disciplines and ideologies taught and wrote in many languages, as The New School's apogee? Does not that imply that it was all downhill from there? Perhaps. I can hear our new historians Robinson and Beard warning against nostalgia!

It's not clear that the rest of the New School's 20th century was just a routinization of the charisma of the first quarter-century. Exciting new ventures came and went, and the school institutionalized, managing in our own time to look enough like a conventional university to attract thousands of full-time students and employ hundreds of full-time faculty. It may still contain the Kallenist spark (which may itself have been less than entirely deliberate), but not if we think that it has all this while been trying to "become a university." At a time when "the university" is under fire as archaic and unaffordable, our gamble is that understanding the ongoing experiment of The New School will make us all more creative social researchers, thinking pluralistically outside the boxes of disciplines and monolithic academic institutions.

We all laughed when our past president paid some Mad Men to rebrand us and they came up with "The New School: A University." What else should we be, we scoffed, a bar and lounge? a pita bread? a scent? But they may have been onto something, if unwittingly. Long may the experiment go on! "For a time it even resembled a university," one imagines someone in the future saying; "Even Homer nods!"

Wish us luck telling the rest of this story!

Picturing The New School

I opened today's session of New School Century with a 1931 snibbet from a newspaper in Danish (or is it Norwegian?). (See leaf 19 of scrapbook 4.) On my first skim of the scrapbooks I exulted in our being important enough to be written about in Europe, but attention to the ads makes clear that this is a New York newspaper (the name is lost), a reminder of what a polyglot city this has always been. It confirms also that The New School was of interest not just to one or two communities in the City.
The list of classes being offered at The New School is pretty awesome too - and this snibbet includes only Torsdag and Fredag! Robert Frost on poetry, Frank Lloyd Wright on architecture, Sidney Hook and Horace Kallen on philosophy, Doris Humphrey and John Martin on dance, among others, and one Thomas H. Benton on "Craftsmanship and Art." That Benton is, of course, the muralist of my favorite lost New School space. Here's the Benton muraled conference room on the 5th floor in 1931.

You've seen the colors of the murals, but I've learned that the overall effect was brighter still, with a varnished walnut floor, black-lacquer furniture and walls, a russet-red ceiling surrounded by subtle lights, and curtains in cerulian blue. In any case, I argued, along with a few other spaces like the Orozco Room two floors up, this room was the most distinctive of The New School and its engaged worldly ethos, and so came to represent the distinctiveness of The New School experience.

It certainly will have produced an enveloping experience whether for discussions or lectures (more so than the Orozco-muraled cafeteria, whose figures are not life-size and in your space, but abstracted and located at eye level and above). It was the ideal setting for showing that the refugee intellectuals of the University in Exile were indeed in America. And in promotional materials for the BA program and the Institute of Retired Professionals from the early 1960s, the Benton Room showed that this was no ordinary school, with ordinary rooms. Later, in the Seminar College and early Eugene Lang College, the Benton Room was where the life- and community-defining orientation (later called "tally") happened - here copies of catalogs from each of them.

 

When the murals were sold (mainly to raise money, but also for conservationist reasons, as they were suffering from scuffing as people leaned chairs back against them, and suffused with cigarette smoke), part of New School identity went with it.

One of the readings for class was from Berenice Abbott's A Guide to Better Photography, yet another important popularizing book which grew out of a course at The New School. Abbott is, indeed, credited with creating the country's first photography program at The New School, starting in 1935. Abbott is encouraging to her readers - anyone can be a photographer - but doesn't downplay the hard work of taking better photographs. A good photographer works with what she knows, and composes her shot to let the truth of the object show. Abbott illustrated this with two pictures she took of the NY Stock Exchange.
The first was taken on a weekend, since traffic made setting up a tripod hard on a weekday, but the building was in shadow and the street deserted. She returned and returned to the spot until she found out when the light was on the facade just right - just twenty minutes each day! - and when the flag was hoisted - only holidays. In the end she persuaded the president of the Stock Exchange to have it hoisted just for her, since on holidays the street is deserted, too. For the bigger problem was people: when there was too much traffic she couldn't take a picture, but an empty street won't work, for two reasons.

Human activity, flow of crowds in the narrow street, was needed to offset that static neoclassic facade ... Most of all, of course, the Stock Market without feverish human movement is totally uncharacteristic. (25)

The characteristic feverish movement takes place inside the building, but a photo even of the outside has to convey it somehow if it is to be an effective portrait of the Stock Exchange! The resulting image shows a concatenation of light, people, cars, flag which, in fact, never happens, but it became iconic because it shows the true life of the building.

We asked the students what picture they would take to show what's characteristic of The New School... You can see why the Benton Room was so much photographed to represent us: it brought the busy world into the classroom - sort of the obverse of what Abbott did in her Stock Market portrait. I'll let you know what they come up with!